Editing Board Settings and Understanding What The Settings Do

Customer Success Team

May 14, 2019 13:08

Updated

Board owners can edit board properties by going to the Settings tab. They are able to edit any setting within the Settings tab. Board administrators other than the owner can change any of the settings in the Points, Topics, and Notification areas but cannot change the Settings in the Basics and Members areas.

1. Access your board of choice via the pulldown at the top.

2. Click the “Settings” button on the top of the ribbon.

Basics

The "Basics" settings are editable only by the board owner. You must click "Save Settings" at the top right to save changes you make:

Board Name: Change the board name to whatever makes the most sense for your organization or class.

Board Category: Change the board category to make it easier to search for and find your board. This category is more important for Public boards that you wish to be open to your full organization.

Board Status: Change whether the board is active and accepting new posts or is "view only," in which students will be able to see the board but not Pin, Comment, or use other social functionality of Yellowdig. This setting can be toggled at any time by instructors if, for example, an instructor wants to "pause" the board during a break.

Board End Date: This will set the board to stop grade passback and stop sending notifications at the end of this day. Learn more about the board end date here.

Check Boxes:

Points System Enabled: Toggle this setting to enable or disable the points system for the selected board.*

Grade Passback Enabled: Toggle this setting to stop and start automated passback to your LMS gradebook from the Yellowdig point system. Please note that student scores from Yellowdig are sent to your LMS as a proportion of the total Yellowdig points set for the course. Do note that this grade passing is one-way from Yellowdig to your gradebook, and for most institutions it happens automatically every 4 hours. That means that if you edit a grade in your LMS gradebook, it will not edit anything in Yellowdig's point system; and, as long as passback is enabled, that change will get overwritten whenever Yellowdig runs the next grade sync. If you want to manually enter or edit Yellowdig grades, you will need to export the Yellowdig grade column and import into a separate grade column in your LMS. You can also stop the grade passback sync by toggling off this setting (e.g., at the end of a course you can stop grade passback and safely edit the grades to create a final Yellowdig grade). However, if you do re-enable passback, any manual changes will start being overwritten again by the score data housed in Yellowdig. The fact that Yellowdig passes a proportion score has some implications for how you might want to both set up points in Yellowdig and set up Yellowdig in your LMS gradebook.

Allow Anonymous Posts and Comments: Enabling this option by checking the box will allow any board follower to post Pins and Comments without displaying their name to other people on the board. To prevent possible abuse, board owners are always able to see who made a post, and posters are told about this whenever they make an anonymous post. This functionality can allow a student to provide information about a sensitive topic or provide a possibly unpopular opinion without concerns about judgement from other students. If anonymous posting is enabled, it can also allow instructors and other administrators to also post anonymously. Making anonymous posts as an instructor can provide a good way to give feedback or spur discussion without unduly influencing the conversation, as might happen if the learners know that the opinion is the instructor's.

Allow Pin Removal When Comments Exist: If this option is checked and enabled, students will be able to delete their Pins even when someone else has Commented on it. We typically recommend unchecking this option so that students are not allowed to delete their Pins if someone has already commented on them.

Enable Emojis in Pins: Checking this provides students with a menu of emojis in the Pin and Comment editor that can easily be added. These can be turned off for the entire organization, so a board owner may not be able to toggle this functionality at the board level.

Enable High Contrast Mode: For accessibility, a high contrast mode is available for anyone that may have a visual impairment. Checking this box will enable it for the selected board.

Danger Zone:

Change Board Ownership: Click “Change board ownership,” enter the new owner's email, and hit “Send.” The new owner needs to be an existing board follower.

Delete Board: Delete the board at the end of the semester. Only the organizational administrator can re-enable the board once it has been disabled.

* Typically an instructor would decide whether to use points before a class starts and not change this setting mid-course. However, this setting could be toggled off and on should you wish. Do note that during any time when points are disabled: 1) The scoring area that typically appears on the right of the board is no longer displayed to learners; 2) learners will not be able to know how many points they have earned in Yellowdig; and 3) learners will not earn points for any of their activities in the board. Any points already accumulated by learners while points were enabled are not deleted from the system and will be displayed again to students if points are re-enabled. Instructors can also view students points while they are disabled from the Admin tab. Disabling or enabling points does not affect the point rules that are set within the Points area of the Settings tab, and they are simply re-instated when points are re-enabled.

Members

In this area you will see a list of all board members, their e-mails, and when they became a board follower. The board owner can assign any follower as an administrator for the board by checking the box next to their name in the admin column. Admins should be left as board followers. If a professor wants to revoke the rights of any board member to access the board, they can uncheck the box in the follower column and leave off the admin check box. That user will no longer be able to access or contribute to the board.

The "Members" settings are editable only by the board owner.

Points

The "Points" settings can be edited by any board administrator. Once any of the values are edited, you will need to click "Save Settings" at the top right. The point system settings deserves some careful consideration, so please see this Knowledge Base article to learn more.

Topics

We recommend that instructors set topics to be required or at least suggested. Beyond that, creating and using Topics is easy, and we recommend doing that before a course starts. Topics do provide a lot of additional functionality and options which may not be immediately evident to you from this settings page.

Notifications

Here is a Knowledge Base article about setting up participation notifications for your learners, which we highly recommend.